Peter Foster: A hunger for logic

The Hunger Games isn’t an allegory for capitalism. It’s a ­centrally controlled nightmare

Carl Icahn may be experiencing some hunger pains. After holding shares in Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment for several years, and making an unsuccessful takeover bid for the company, he sold out last summer for $7 a share. Lions Gate is now trading at more than double that, almost entirely due to The Hunger Games, which broke box office records for a non-sequel last weekend, hauling in $155-million. Mr. Icahn, however, seems to be nowhere near as dyspeptic as some of the movie’s reviewers, who have used it as an excuse to unload a groaning board of left-liberal tripe.

The movie — which is based on the first of a trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins about a dystopian future U.S., called Panem, in which poor teenagers are forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of totalitarian overlords who live in Capitol City — is well done. The books have been wildly popular due to their feisty heroine, Katniss Everdeen (played in the movie by Jennifer Lawrence), who steps in to volunteer for combat when her younger sister is selected for the games.

The first half of the movie is devoted to a cross between martial arts training and Miss America-style interviews. The second half is the actual contest, which blends The Truman Show and Rollerball, with a side of Lord of the Flies. This is all good escapism, even if the sinister overlords of Capitol City both dress and act more like the residents of Whoville.

So how does the leftist media view all this? According to one deep thinker, Panem is “a capitalist dictatorship.” Instead of seeing the vast gap between Panem and modern America, another critic suggests it’s only a “mild exaggeration” of current affairs. Yet another suggests that “There’s virtually nothing in the movie that doesn’t seem within the realm of reality.”

Are they kidding? The movie contains some pretty clunky satire on reality game shows, but to mistake its reductio ad absurdum approach for reality would be, well, absurd. It would be like projecting as plausible a version of The Biggest Loser where the person who loses the least weight each week is eaten by the other contestants. But then there’s the economic angle. The Hunger Games, according to one commentator, is “The ultimate story of the Great Recession… a stark vision of class conflict.” Another Chatterer suggests that it’s “an allegory of Western culture’s rapacious — even murderous — consumption of human labour and resources for its own advancement and entertainment.” The same jaded soul suggests that modern teenagers would willingly sign up for such gladiatorial combat “provided that it was covered by a national network and that the winner would come out with the latest iPhone and a lifetime unlimited data plan.”

Other brilliant insights inspired by the movie include that it “aims an angry eye at our bloodthirsty, watch-anything-and-cheer culture,” and that Panem’s dictator, Coriolanus Snow (played by Donald Sutherland) is “not the first American leader to speak about hope, but he’s the first to make it into a threat. The road between here and there may be shorter than we fear.” Some reviewers suggest that forcing children to kill each other is just a metaphor for Iraq: kids for oil.

Matt Ridley pointed out in The Rational Optimist that of Americans today designated as “poor,” 99% have electricity, running water, flush toilets and a refrigerator; 95% have a television, 88% a telephone, 71% a car and 70% air conditioning. However, according to Hunger Games interpreters, those who get rich by providing these goods and services (and employ people) would prefer it if the poor lived in tarpaper shacks. Doesn’t make much sense, unless, that is, you have an utterly demonic view of capitalism and see “1%” written all over Capitol City.

In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker alluded to the fact that the less violence there is in society, the more we obsess about it. Where, 300 years ago, seven-year-olds might be hanged for stealing a petticoat, now bullying is a national issue. However, for left-liberal dystopians, capitalist murder is always just around the corner.

The Malthusian, zero-sum, left-liberal mind appears to see all wealth as either taken from “the poor” or robbed from “the future.” It appears utterly incapable of seeing a world of voluntary relationships because it is obsessed by power, and believes that corporations, too, can be concerned with nothing else. Of course, corporations are occasionally dangerous, but never so dangerous as when aided by Big Government, and that, in fact, is what Panem represents, a centrally controlled nightmare which seeks to crush the human spirit — which is synonymous with capitalism — by creating deliberate scarcity.

And yet, according to one sophisticated university professor, The Hunger Games is “an allegory for dog-eat-dog capitalism.… We are not literally cutting each other’s throats yet, but there is a very clear sense of desperation here. We all know people who have lost their jobs and ­houses, and it’s a very scary thing.”

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